Check out this piece and the associated comments on Scott Miller’s Game Matters blog.

Tough question, since every bad game is bad in its own way. Since I know strategy games better than any other genre, here’s a quick and dirty guide to making a bad strategy game.

1. Bad interface – this is the real killer. A good UI can pass by almost unnoticed – look at the elegance of Rise of Nations, for instance. A lot of strategy games confuse complex with complicated and make an interface that tends to the latter.

2. Backwards priorities – Think about this year’s Superpower 2. Deep and complicated domestic model with a lot of detail on social and economic policy. Now look at the foreign policy/military model – terrible. People play world politics sims – mostly – because they are interested in wars and diplomacy and all that stuff. By putting more energy into how many options were open to a player who liked variable tax rates, Golemlabs completely missed the boat. The result was one of the most disappointing games of the year.

3.Quick copies – no game can become a success without seeing a spate of copycats in its wake. Soon after Civilization became a hit, 4x games were all over the place. One of the most ignominious was Activision’s Rise and Rule of Ancient Empires. It had research, city building, warfare – all the stuff that Civ had. But it had only two sides, terrible graphics and no real sense of discovery and expansion. It short, it was Civ-Lite. Look at all those Tycoon games. How many are actually any good? Two? Three? Even Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 and Railroad Tycoon 3 were middling games – and they have real legacies behind them. National Lampoon’s University Tycoon? Rarely have I needed to play a game less to know how much it stinks.

Feel free to contribute more suggestions. This list is hardly exhaustive.

For the last couple of weeks, Ensemble Studios has had little historical teasers on their website, advertising the upcoming Age of Empires 3. So far we’ve had the usual stuff on Sargon, the Greeks, the Romans, etc.

Now we have one that’s clearly Medieval – “1096 – the First Crusade”.

This can only mean one thing. Age of Empires 3 will be a combination of the first two Age games, taking us from the beginning of history into the Middle Ages.

Will they go beyond that? Unclear, but unlikely. Bruce Shelley told me in an unpublished interview that pre-mechanization weapons have a lot going for them game design wise, not least of which are ease of comprehension and looking cool.

So you heard it hear – but probably not first – “Age of Empires 3: Stabby, stabby goodness.”

Gamespy’s End of Year wrap-up has three strategy games on their PC top ten list: Warhammer, Rome and Sims 2, with Sims 2 taking strategy game of the year honors. I guess you could consider Pirates a strategy game, after a fashion, but it’s really more action/RPG in my opinion. Warhammer gets the nod as the game that best used a license and Kohan 2 is acknowledged as the most underrated game of 2004.

IGN has given out its PC Game of the Year awards, too, and recognizes the same big games – Sims 2 and Rome. Sims 2 gets dubbed best management sim of the year and Rome wins best strategy game and best use of sound. Rise of Nations: Thrones and Patriots wins best expansion of the year.

Not many real surprises here. I don’t take IGN all that seriously – they have a “Babes” section, for crying out loud – but both sites have made reasonable cases. The lack of Doom 3 awards is kind of shocking given the general salivation from the mainstream press, but since it’s a shooter I won’t say anymore than that.

While reading a thread on “Best RTS of the Year”, I noticed a lot of votes for Rome: Total War. It’s my favorite game of the year – so far – so I understand the sentiment. But is it really RTS? The real “strategy” component (the campaign game) is turn-based, not real time. The battle engine is actually tactics, not strategy, though some of the battles can have strategic consequences – especially when you hunt down that 8-star Celtic general who has been driving you crazy. In fact, if you simulate most of the battles, there is precious little real time stuff going on at all.

You often hear people say how much they hate RTS games, but in this case they usually have one type of RTS in mind. They are talking about those Warcraft/Starcraft type games where you assign peons to collect resources and then build an army to smack your opponent.

Then you have the RTS games like Paradox’s grand strategy games – Europa Universalis and its progeny. Clearly strategy, clearly real-time, but nothing like either the Total War games or the *crafts.

You could even go so far as to call city-builder or Tycoon games RTS, since they require strategy and unfold in real-time.

In short, RTS is as broad a category as strategy itself. With turn-based games largely being pushed aside (except in ye olde wargame circles), RTS may simply become synonymous with strategy.

I would prefer to separate the *craft and Age of X games from the lot by calling them 3H games – Harvest, Hoard and Hassle. We already have 4X as an abbreviation, so 3H fits just fine. Plus, it is more descriptive of the game style than the simple delineation of how time is measured.

The Paradox Games can just be called Real Time Grand Strategy since that’s all it is. Everything is done in real time, the decisions are all pretty high level, so RTGS it is.

As for the Total War games (and the upcoming Imperial Glory from Pyro Studios), they kind of stand alone. Real-time Historical Battle Sims doesn’t do justice to the campaign component, and Action Risk is too snarky to be useful. So feel free to contribute a new acronym for these types of games.

OK, we all know that this is a stupid award show targetting…well, I’m not sure who they are targetting. Lots of rappers were presenters, so I guess the target audience was anyone who likes rap or hip-hop music. But the models purring cheat codes suggest that they were targetting teenage males. Tara Reid was there, though, so the target audience may have been the mentally infirm.

Anyway, you can find a list of the winners just about anywhere so there’s no need to rehash them all. I will say that the Spike TV Video Game Awards have done strategy games no favors by not having any strategy games win. Rome: Total War was nominated for best PC game, but that was about it. I mean, there isn’t even a Best Strategy Game category – or best sim. There is Best Military Game, but that went to a shooter. Considering how console focused the whole show is, I shouldn’t be too surprised.

So we have these awards and we have the AIAS awards and all the publications’ annual lists. Hopefully in a few years, when Spike TV reinvents itself again to be a cooking channel, this travesty of a broadcast will be long gone. But there is still no industry awards show that anybody takes really seriously. In fact, I suspect that an endorsement as “Game of the Year” from any of the PC Magazines carries more weight with gamers and developers than anything that Snoop Dogg passes out.

The ironic thing about the Spike awards is that no matter how often they drag some celebrity on stage to say that they game, too, the less secure in my coolness I feel. So Method Man and Red play games? Good for them. I’m sure they do a lot of stuff that I do – eat, drink, sleep. I don’t think I need a man of average talent or woman of even less talent (hello, Ms. Reid)to make me feel like I’m part of some big social movement of urban cool. I came out of the gaming closet a year ago.

Oliver Stone’s Alexander was a critical failure and a commercial mediocrity. Despite all the pre-release hype and early Oscar buzz, the end product was a major disappointment, especially to ancient history afficianadoes like myself.

So you have to feel sorry for GSC Gameworld, the Ukrainian developer tapped to make the “official” Alexander game. Movie tie-ins are pretty commonplace in the gaming industry these days, and now a strategy game is getting the Hollywood treatment. I’m sure that GSC was hoping that the movie would be a huge hit and that people would start picking up the game with a pouty Colin Farrel on the box.

And now they are entering a crowded Christmas season stuck to a dud of a movie. Plus, there are two other Alexander games out there. Tin Solider: Alexander the Great is a wargame, and Alexander: The Heroes Hour is sort of a roleplaying RTS.

GSC’s big advantage is its track record. They made Cossacks and American Conquest – two games that I could not see the appeal of, but both managed to be huge hits is Europe. Alexander was intended to be a showcase for their new Cossacks II engine, though a quick glance didn’t reveal any major changes to the game.

The reviews I’ve seen of Alexander the game are average at best (IGN gave it a high of 7, though the text of the review made it seem that the reviewer hated it.) The demo did nothing for me, but, like I said, I didn’t like their other games either.

We’re used to seeing bad computer games come out of movies. But when your game was supposed to debut some of your new tech, the one-two punch of a bad movie and a mediocre game worries you. I, of course, have little doubt that GSC will continue to make money hand over fist from the Euro market for Cossacks II. Still, the debacle of a movie must have made some people at GSC wince when they saw what they were tied to. I mean, no one expected Catwoman to be good.

The idea of making a game about Alexander is not so new or original. In fact, there is little doubt that, given the release of the movie, Alexander games were inevitable. After all, the release of the Troy movie was closely followed by the abysmal Battle for Troy and the expansion for Spartan, Gates of Troy (soon available in North America). But to so conspicuously tie a strategy game to a movie is a big moment for the genre. I’m sure that it looked like a win-win for GSC. The movie was getting good buzz while in production, GSC has a lot of loyal fans and with Ubisoft doing the distribution there was good chance of shelf space – unlike the other Alexander games.

Until I play the full version, I will reserve final judgment on whether GSC has made a silk purse out of Stone’s sow’s ear.